Square Enix President: We need to Meet The Needs of Our Customers in a More Timely Manner

After the turnover with Yoichi Wada, the new president of Square Enix Yosuke Matsuda feels that changes are in order at the company. Today he explained in an interview on Infoseek that Square Enix needs to be faster in meeting the needs of its customers:

The first core is “standardization”, the second is “personality”. It’s like growing a fashion brand. A particularly important indicator is “asset turnover”. Developers want to invest money and time for production, but it leads to a reduction in turnover. The point is striking a balance there.

In fact, one of the factors behind our losses is a delay from development to the market. That delay means a reduction in the frequency of the contact with the users. We need to establish a system that will meet the needs of our customers in a more timely manner. Not quite so leisurely, and with one-year terms. We have to enact urgent changes.

I’m honestly not sure on how I feel about this. From what Matsuda says, it seems that Square Enix is heading towards the quick turnaround of games we see from companies like Activision or Ubisoft. While I agree that extreme cases like Final Fantasy Versus XIII, that are bogged in production for years, can be quite bad, but chugging out rushed titles once a year may not be that much better, at least for quality.

Hailing from sunny (not as much as people think) Italy and long standing gamer since the age of Mattel Intellivision and Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Definitely a multi-platform gamer, he still holds the old dear PC nearest to his heart, while not disregarding any console on the market.
RPGs (of any nationality) and MMORPGs are his daily bread, but he enjoys almost every other genre, prominently racing simulators, action and sandbox games.
He is also one of the few surviving fans of the flight simulator genre on Earth.